I refuse to see Mel Gibson’s snuff film Passion because I’m pretty sure that Gibson has flipped his lid and I have no desire to see a guy in a rubber suit get flogged for 2 hours. The desire to even make such a movie suggests to me a diseased mind, and it seems like…

Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis is a devastating disease that claims the upper and lower motor neurons, and ultimately the lives of most patients within 3-5 years of diagnosis, usually from respiratory failure. Patients lose control of voluntary muscles as the pathways that innervate them degenerate. Lou Gehrig and Stephen Hawking are two famous ALS patients. Now…

Mixing Memory brings up some excellent points regarding mirror neurons in primates, and Frontal Cortex follows up with his thoughts. To both of them I say “bravo, but your skepticism probably doesn’t go far enough”. We give Rizzolatti et al too much credit with their conclusions. After all, they’ve only demonstrated the existence of mirror…

I’m not a fan of conservative ideologies. I see them as regressive and stifling. Too often there is a quasi-religious adherence to “free market” as the solution to all life’s problems, usually accompanied by the corollary “lower taxes”. Whether or not one agrees that these principles are bad policy, we can look at the current…